Walkabout: Brooklyn's Fox Theater, Part 1

 Downtown Brooklyn once had a theater district as vibrant as Manhattan’s, with almost as many theaters, offering the gamut of entertainment from opera to Shakespeare, popular slapstick comedies to classic dramas, vaudeville to minstrel shows.

In the early to mid-1800’s, most of these theaters were gathered around the area where Cadman Plaza is today, as well as on Fulton Street, near Gage and Tollner’s.

By the end of the century, and into the 20th, the theater district had moved closer to Flatbush Avenue, and was centered still on Fulton Street, as well as Flatbush, Nevins, and Fleet Street.

All of these theaters had stories to tell, but today’s story is about the largest and grandest of Brooklyn’s four great movie palaces. Brooklyn had the RKO Albee Theatre, the Brooklyn Paramount, the Loew’s Metropolitan, and the largest and most opulent, the Fox Theater.

The Fox Theater’s address was 20 Flatbush Avenue, at the intersection of Nevins, Flatbush and Livingston Streets. The Fox Theatre’s cornerstone was laid in September of 1927, and it opened with much fanfare in August of 1928.

The large building was designed by C. Howard Crane, a Detroit-based architect who specialized in theaters and movie houses. In the course of his career, he designed over 250 theaters, with over 50 in the Detroit area alone.

He was the designer of several of the Fox company’s other theaters, including the 5,174 seat Fox Theater in Detroit, followed by the slightly smaller 4,500 seat Fox Theater in St. Louis. The Brooklyn Fox was the smallest of the three; a mere 4,305 seats.

The Fox theater chain was the brainchild of movie mogul William Fox. He was an immigrant success story worthy of his own motion picture. He was born Vilmos Fried, in 1879 or 1880 to German-Jewish parents living in Hungary, and came to this country with his parents as a 9 month old baby.

The family name was Anglicized to Fox, due to his mother’s maiden name Fuchs. He grew up dirt poor on the Lower East Side, managing to reach adulthood without ever learning how to read, going to work from the age of eight.

A childhood accident robbed him of the use of one of his arms, but neither illiteracy nor handicap would deter Fox from success.

In 1900, at 20 years of age, he started his own textile company which he sold four years later to finance the purchase of his first nickelodeon. In 1914, he began the Fox Film Corporation.

Fox Films was more about distribution than movie making, and Fox was more interested in movie theaters than heading a studio.

In 1925, William Fox began his ambitious plan to build enormous and ornate movie palaces, the largest movie houses ever. That year, he also bought the rights to a new integrated sound-on-film system invented by three German inventors and American inventor, Theodore Case.

He renamed the system Fox Movie-tone, one of the earliest film-with-soundtrack systems in the industry. His Movietone Newsreels, with the news of the day, would be a theater staple until 1963.

By 1928, he had five enormous theaters, all called Fox, in San Francisco, Atlanta, and as mentioned above, Detroit, St. Louis and Brooklyn.

Brooklyn was also home to a smaller (2,000) seat theater called the Savoy, on Bedford Avenue near Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, which until the downtown Fox was built, was the largest Fox theater in Brooklyn.

And what a theater it was. From the outside, the Brooklyn Fox looked like an office building with a marquee. There were offices inside, as well as retail stores on the ground floor. But the inside of the theater was a different story.

The style could only be called over the top eclectic. It was Baroque on steroids, combining elements of India and the East Indies with Baroque and Art Deco.

Every surface of the theater was decorated, gilded, draped, carved, painted, polished or plastered. The grand lobby rose four stories high, with a massive staircase leading to the levels of the theater.

The opulent restrooms lay downstairs, and passageways and smaller stairs led patrons to the various parts of the theater. There were no elevators for the theater goers.

The proscenium opening was 50′ wide and 35′ high, with the lip of the stage cantilevering over the orchestra pit. The height of the auditorium from the orchestra floor to the ceiling was 96′.

The seats rose at a steep angle on the balconies, and above levels, with horrible acoustics in most of the mezzanine, which was little deterrent to those who wanted to be there to just take the experience in.

This was not just a movie palace; it was a real theater, with ample room backstage to swing in and build sets, single and multiple dressing rooms, rehearsal, chorus, and orchestra rooms below stage level, and upstairs, a music library and rehearsal rooms on the 8th floor and a costume shop on the 9th.

The theater also boasted one of the five Fox Specials Wurlitzer organs, this one with four keyboards and 37 ranks of pipes.

Aside from the usual organ effects, this organ had special stops with snare drum, bass drum, Chinese gong, castanets, tambourine, and other musical effects, as well as a junk board with the sounds of surf, auto horns, birds, horse hoofs, boat and locomotive whistles.

Opening night of the Fox, in 1928 was a splendid affair, attended by Mr. Fox, as well as Brooklyn dignitaries, special guests and a lot of other people.

They were treated to Charles Previn leading the 70 piece Fox Theater Grand Orchestra in Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture, and a jazz arrangement of the Blue Danube Waltz.

This was followed by Fox Movietone News clips, and a short film showing playwright George Bernard Shaw mimicking Benito Mussolini.

That was followed by a stage show of dancing and choral works with a Neapolitan theme, followed by the running of the feature film Street Angel, set in Naples starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell.

This grand opening heralded several years of stage and screen shows, for the Fox, as the corporation went on to reach 800 theaters, with the company valued at $200 million, by 1929.

The Fox Metropolitan Theater Corporation, which controlled all New York City theaters, had a total seating capacity of 140,000 people.

In July of 1929, William Fox was in a near-fatal car crash that put him in the hospital for three months. Unfortunately, that was only his first crash of 1929.

By 1933, Fox Film Corp. was in receivership. By 1936, William Fox declared bankruptcy.

The Great Depression, as well as Fox’s own over-reaching, came simultaneously and came down hard. We’ll see what happens next time.

Part 2, The Fox Theater discovers television, and rocks and rolls to the end.

[Photos via the Library of Congress]